*Miles to go before I sleep,* Spike thought, struggling to sit up and failing - falling heavily back. The pain of it almost made him cry, and he sighed out a shaking breath and just lay there, wavering in and out of consciousness and lucidity. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he was going to die - was going to fall to dust and it would all be over. An ending he'd miraculously escaped twice in nearly two centuries. The idea of facing it again left a sour taste in his mouth - made him rage weakly, cold tears slipping out from under clenched lids. He didn't want to die - not here, not now. Not when he'd survived so much. But he was so tired, and everything hurt and he was too weak to do anything at all but lay there, his mind worked free of time and wandering...

It took a month for Spike to realize that he wasn't going to stay in L.A. That he couldn't. Wolfram and Hart was gone, and Angel was back in the good graces of the Powers That Be. The Powers had stepped in at the last moment and snatched Wes out of Blue's arms - fixed him and changed him and made him Vision Boy. And the Council - they had decided they liked Angel again, too. The Circle of the Black Thorn had been known, it seemed, in more places than L.A. and the Council had heard about what they'd done - and approved. And just like that, Angel's back in the fold. Buying some other decrepit pile of a hotel, moving himself, Gunn, Blue and Wes right in - getting dispatches and phone calls from the Council and then getting his own little pack of Slayers-in-training and Andrew, for fuck's sake. Spike suffered too many unexpected hugs and random monologues from the geekiest Watcher ever - suffered Angel's growing aloofness and the twitchy suspicion of the Slayers. And truly suffered Blue's random flash-backs to Fred, when she'd waver between antediluvian god-king and virginal Texas co-ed. He couldn't stand that - couldn't watch her immobile, wind-up-doll face melt into the animated features of one of the only friends he'd had. Couldn't stand to hear that soft Texas slur come out of corpse-blue lips Wes couldn't stand it much, either, and he and Spike had shared silent, somehow comforting bottles of beer in a little bar down the street. The ex-Watcher really hadn't been half bad, in the end. But it wasn't enough, and Spike had known that he had to go. So he did..

There'd been more explosions, and sounds of shouting, of a siren. All of it dinning in his ears like some sort of off-key symphony and he'd curled into his nest and put his hands over his ears, trying to block it all out. His head pounded - a hangover without any alcohol - and his skin felt too tight - felt stretched over his bones like cheap vellum. He knew he was saying something, but he couldn't hear his own voice, and his lips rasped against the velvet of the cushion he had under his head. "Please be quiet, please be quiet, please, please, please..."


In the oven-hot, brown-tinged air of an L.A. June he found a car he liked somewhere on Rodeo and stole as much blood as would reasonably keep for a week or so from a blood bank and headed north. Didn't know why, really. Dru was somewhere south, and he really thought he should go see her sometime - see if she'd ever really gotten over Angel trying to kill her. But he didn't. He went back instead. Back to the last place he'd ever thought he'd go. Sunnydale.


He couldn't curl up like he wanted to because it hurt, and after a while it was a lot like the games he and Dru had played once upon a time, with steel and glass and rope twisted tight. But there was no surcease, here - no cool-wet, iron-sweet mouth licking him down and putting out the flames. He writhed, clawing at the quilts and shredding them - wanting to rake his fingernails over his chest and belly but not daring.

"Dru-love, poppet, please - find me a drink, yeah? Find me a...find me some whiskey, yeah? Dru...Dru..." She didn't answer, and he gasped in dust and the reek of burnt-out candles, tasting blood diluted with vinegar - with something bitter and sharp - on his lips. "Why hast thou forsaken me...?" he mumbled. But he wasn't the Christ, and he wondered if the cross on the altar-cloth would eventually burn through the quilts and scorch him. He closed his eyes and sank again, letting the loop of time drag him down.


In the battle with Wolfram and Hart he'd taken some good hits - gotten himself pretty torn up. The worst injury was three deep, parallel gashes some clawed appendage had sliced into him. He hadn't really seen it happen - barely even remembered what had done it. But they'd been sealed over and gone in two or three days, surprising even himself with the speed with which they closed. Even if there had been a lingering kind of...irritaion. But now, standing on the lip of the crater that was Sunnydale, they itched. A deep, burning sort of itch that was maddening - that really kind of hurt. Irritated, he pulled up his t-shirt and looked down at himself, noticing uneasily that where the gashes had been were now lines of bluish-black. Faint, but there. They radiated a kind of sickly heat and he snatched his hand away from them, wondering what the fuck was going on. Hellmouth vibe, maybe - sympathetic something-or-other, who knows? He waved for a moment on the lip of the crater, but then shrugged and started the slow trek down to the bottom.

Away over near the far northern edge there were trailers and makeshift huts and piles of material - earthmovers in glaring yellow and halogen lights strung on flex, mounted up high on spidery scaffolding. Someone had finally realized exactly how much money was to be made selling prime, ocean-front SoCal real estate, and the process of reclaiming Sunnydale had begun. Spike wondered what they did with all the corpses buried beneath them - with all the demon corpses. In the last days, hundreds of demons had flocked to the Hellmouth, attracted as moth to flames by the dark, wild energy of the First. Hell - he'd seen at least three kinds of demons skulking in the ruins already, digging for that elusive Hellmouth vibe and looting the skeleton of the town. Spike just wanted to see...everything. Take a last tour before he headed out for real, and got as far away from the Hellmouth - from the memories - as he could. As he picked his way down-slope he staggered a little, and cursed, and went on.


"You bloody bastard. Don't know I can walk, do you -" Spike struggled to stand up - get to his feet - show Angelus that he could walk now. But he couldn't - he couldn't walk, and he scrabbled at his legs, growling, only to snatch his hands away as pain sizzled through his skin. "What did you do to me, you bitch? What did you do?" He hugged the stiff cushion closer, whimpering, and closed his eyes.



A week later he'd drunk the last of his blood - and almost heaved it up - and was contemplating the climb back out with something like despair. He felt...wrong. Felt off, and the bruise-colored marks of the sealed-over cuts had deepened, looking like slashes of plum-black ink on his skin. They throbbed and burned, and he could feel something in him - some sort of sickness, some sort of corruption. Black tide of acid wrongness skeining through him. He didn't know what to do - didn't know if he could make it back up to his car. He'd been sleeping through the days in the half-buried ruins of a storage locker but idiot vamps and a few demons keep stumbling through so he moved his lair - found a church that was miraculously intact under the layers of sifted rubble. It kept the vamps away - 'credulous god-botherers' - he thought, quoting a mostly-forgotten book and smirking to himself. The parishioners had had a soup kitchen sort of setup going, and in the supplies in the basement he'd found stacks of old, faded quilts and boxes of jumble-sale clothes and tinned vegetables. He found a dusty velvet cushion in one of the confessionals and made himself a nest on top of the altar - curled up there, shivering a little. He'd rest, sleep a bit. Get up at sunset and make his way out.

Some time later - he really wasn't sure how long - he was still there, and faintly hungry, and for the first time in over 150 years he had a fever, which was unpleasant and frightening. He'd stumbled out into the ringing darkness of the crater, flinching from the harsh grinding of the earthmovers' treads over concrete and crumpled steel. They were blasting up there on the ridge and the distant crump of the explosions shivered through him. He found a vamp rooting through the twisted remains of a Savings and Loan and snatched it - drank its cold blood down. It sat oddly in his stomach but he was hungry. The smell of cordite and petrol and heated metal made him turn his face away and burrow back under - back into the relative quiet of the church, which still had the lingering scents of incense and old wood and must. Familiar and comforting, almost homey. It made him dream of Dru, to lie there in the blue-green gloom of midday. Watching through half-lidded eyes the sun moving behind the stained glass windows that were still, somehow, intact. He slept and woke and slept again, losing track of the hours - of the days. Shuddering in spasms as the fever gripped him and twisted him, making his bones ache. Making his skin ache, and after a while he folded his duster and used it for an extra pillow when the weight of it became too much. It made his shoulders burn - it hurt where the edges whipped around his shins and his boots were too heavy - too stiff. He lined them up by the altar and padded barefoot, flinching from the cold of the bare floor. He tolerated the jeans because he wasn't going to go naked here, but the t-shirt chaffed him - hurt the scars - and he finally took to wearing an old dress-shirt he found in the charity boxes. Mid-colored grey-blue cotton washed to cob-web thinness and softness. He left it fluttering open over his chest, not able to bear even that whisper-touch of fabric over the scars.


The machine-noises were so loud now, they grumbled and grated directly overhead, shaking his bones, making his head hurt in sharp jabs, making him pant for air he didn't need. He pushed himself upright, grimacing, and tried to shout - tell them he was down here, that he needed quiet!

"Need to get my sleep, need to get some rest! damnit, take these chains off, you sod! Chain me like a fucking....dog..." His voice was a cracked shell of itself, barely more than a whisper and he couldn't stay up on his arms any longer. He slipped back - felt his arm sliding over, out from under the quilt. Cold, but he couldn't pull it back. When the cigarette smoke and coffee and dust and machine-smells got very, very strong he just closed his eyes and waited, a faint tremor of fear going through him. He hurt, and he was tired - too tired to try to hide. A timeless time later he could hear a heartbeat thudding in his ears like a war-drum, and he smelled leather and sweat and soap - smelled something... Something almost familiar and he wasn't afraid anymore.